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The Declaration of Independence claims that individuals need liberty to pursue happiness, but provides little guidance on the “what” of happiness. Happiness studies and liberal theory are incomplete guides. Happiness studies offer insights into what makes people happy but happiness policy risks becoming doctrinaire. Liberal theory is better on personal liberty, but weak on the “what” of happiness. My argument is that American novelists are surer guides on the pursuit of happiness. Treated as political thinkers, my book offers a close reading of four American novelists, Tom Wolfe, Walker Percy, Edith Wharton, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and their critique of the pursuit of happiness. With a critical and friendly eye, they present the shortcomings of pursuing happiness in a liberal nation but also present alternatives and correctives possible in America. Our novelists point us toward each other in friendship as our greatest resource to guide us towards happiness.
The Declaration assumes that government has a duty to ensure that its citizens can pursue happiness, but it does not specify how or to what degree a government can or should exert influence over and take responsibility for happiness. The project for this dissertation is to consider American novelists as guides on the pursuit of happiness who with a critical eye can present the shortcomings of pursuing happiness in a liberal nation but also present alternatives and correctives compatible with liberalism. American novelists offer insights about the prospects for happiness in a liberal regime and the difficulties Americans face in attaining it. I examine works by four American novelists--Tom Wolfe, Walker Percy, Edith Wharton, and Nathaniel Hawthorne--in order to show how our novelists engage us in our understanding of and the pursuit of happiness. Through depicting characters pursuing happiness, our novelists show how our political and social order does or does not facilitate the pursuit of happiness and what individual decisions can contribute to or detract from happiness. In so doing, our novelists provide signposts and other markers to indicate what roads and pathways are or are not likely to contribute to happiness. The individual enjoys meaningful freedom to act on his own and in coordination with others for the sake of pursuing happiness. Our novelists point us toward each other as our greatest resource to help us and to guide us toward happiness.
Scholars have long debated the meaning of the pursuit of happiness, yet have tended to define it narrowly, focusing on a single intellectual tradition, and on the use of the term within a single text, the Declaration of Independence. In this insightful volume, Carli Conklin considers the pursuit of happiness across a variety of intellectual traditions, and explores its usage in two key legal texts of the Founding Era, the Declaration and William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. For Blackstone, the pursuit of happiness was a science of jurisprudence, by which his students could know, and then rightly apply, the first principles of the Common Law. For the founders, the pursuit of happiness was the individual right to pursue a life lived in harmony with the law of nature and a public duty to govern in accordance with that law. Both applications suggest we consider anew how the phrase, and its underlying legal philosophies, were understood in the founding era. With this work, Conklin makes important contributions to the fields of early American intellectual and legal history.
A modern classic--back in print and available again. Originally published in 1988, this book draws on advances in psychology and sociology to explore the fundamental questions of what is meant by "success". Rich in fascinating case studies. Line drawings, graphs and tables.
Reeling from her mother's death, an aimless 21st-century teen working at a historic village discovers new friends, new loves, and the courage to forge her own path.
Much interest currently revolves around happiness in America, so much so that one could reasonably argue that there is a “happiness movement” afoot. The wide range of arenas in which happiness intersects reflects the subject’s centrality in everyday life in America these past one hundred years. Happiness in America charts the course of happiness within American culture over the past century, and concludes that most Americans have not had success becoming appreciably happier people despite considerable efforts to do so. Rather than follow a linear path, happiness has bobbed and weaved over the decades, its arc or trajectory a twisting and unpredictable one. Happiness has also both shaped and reflected our core values, with its expression at any given time a key indicator of who we are as a people. The book thus adds a missing and valuable piece to our understanding of American culture. Beyond serving as the definitive guide to happiness in this country, Happiness in America offers readers a provocative argument that challenges standard thinking. Despite popular belief, Americans have never been a particularly happy people. Our perpetual (and futile) search for happiness indicates widespread dissatisfaction and discontent with life in general, something that will come as a surprise to many. The image of Americans as a happy-go-lucky people is thus more mythology than reality, an important finding rooted in the inherent flaws of consumer capitalism. Our competitive and comparative American Way of Life has not proven to be an especially good formula for happiness, Samuel argues, with external signs of success unlikely to produce appreciably happier people. Given these findings, he suggests readers consider abandoning their pursuit of happiness and instead seek out greater joy in life.
A magisterial history that recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness. One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values: religious tolerance, freedom of thought, speech and the press, of rationality and evidence-based argument. Yet why, over three hundred years after it began, is the Enlightenment so profoundly misunderstood as controversial, the expression of soulless calculation? The answer may be that, to an extraordinary extent, we have accepted the account of the Enlightenment given by its conservative enemies: that enlightenment necessarily implied hostility to religion or support for an unfettered free market, or that this was “the best of all possible worlds”. Ritchie Robertson goes back into the “long eighteenth century,” from approximately 1680 to 1790, to reveal what this much-debated period was really about. Robertson returns to the era’s original texts to show that above all, the Enlightenment was really about increasing human happiness – in this world rather than the next – by promoting scientific inquiry and reasoned argument. In so doing Robertson chronicles the campaigns mounted by some Enlightened figures against evils like capital punishment, judicial torture, serfdom and witchcraft trials, featuring the experiences of major figures like Voltaire and Diderot alongside ordinary people who lived through this extraordinary moment. In answering the question 'What is Enlightenment?' in 1784, Kant famously urged men and women above all to “have the courage to use your own intellect”. Robertson shows how the thinkers of the Enlightenment did just that, seeking a well-rounded understanding of humanity in which reason was balanced with emotion and sensibility. Drawing on philosophy, theology, historiography and literature across the major western European languages, The Enlightenment is a master-class in big picture history about the foundational epoch of modern times.
In The Pursuit of Happiness Bianca C. Williams traces the experiences of African American women as they travel to Jamaica, where they address the perils and disappointments of American racism by looking for intimacy, happiness, and a connection to their racial identities. Through their encounters with Jamaican online communities and their participation in trips organized by Girlfriend Tours International, the women construct notions of racial, sexual, and emotional belonging by forming relationships with Jamaican men and other "girlfriends." These relationships allow the women to exercise agency and find happiness in ways that resist the damaging intersections of racism and patriarchy in the United States. However, while the women require a spiritual and virtual connection to Jamaica in order to live happily in the United States, their notion of happiness relies on travel, which requires leveraging their national privilege as American citizens. Williams's theorization of "emotional transnationalism" and the construction of affect across diasporic distance attends to the connections between race, gender, and affect while highlighting how affective relationships mark nationalized and gendered power differentials within the African diaspora.
Responding to volatile criticisms frequently leveled at Leo Strauss and those he influenced, the prominent contributors to this volume demonstrate the profound influence that Strauss and his students have exerted on American liberal democracy and contemporary political thought. By stressing the enduring vitality of classic books and by articulating the theoretical and practical flaws of relativism and historicism, the contributors argue that Strauss and the Straussians have identified fundamental crises of modernity and liberal democracy. This book emphasizes the broad range of Strauss's influence, from literary criticism to constitutional thought, and it denies the existence of a monolithic Straussian political orthodoxy. Both critics and supporters of Strauss' thought are included. All political theorists interested in Strauss's extraordinary impact on political thought will want to read this book.
This book is about the relationship between different concepts of freedom and happiness. The book's authors distinguish three concepts for which an empirical measure exists: opportunity to choose (negative freedom), capability to choose (positive freedom), and autonomy to choose (autonomy freedom). They also provide a comprehensive account of the relationship between freedom and well-being by comparing channels through which freedoms affect quality of life. The book also explores whether the different conceptions of freedom complement or replace each other in the determination of the level of well-being. In so doing, the authors make freedoms a tool for policy making and are able to say which conception is the most effective for well-being, as circumstances change. The results have implications for a justification of a free society: maximizing freedoms is good for its favorable consequences upon individual well-being, a fundamental value for the judgment of human advantage.